Tag Archives: Bible

Jul 25 2009

I wonder….?


studying-mainFull_Full

I wonder…how did Christians make it, and flourish, for hundreds of years without

  • cell phones
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • email
  • computers
  • Christian books
  • Bibles
  • commentaries
  • Sunday school materials
  • cars
  • Christian colleges and universities
  • church buildings
  • missionary societies
  • preacher training schools
  • youth ministers

Well, as you can imagine, the list could be very, very long.

Long before the printed page, (mid 1400’s the first Bible was printed) and even before most of the New Testament was written, the church was doing just fine. There were a few copies of the law and the prophets available but not to the average person. Even for several years after the printing press turned out the first Bible, God’s word was not widely distributed for several years.

I wonder….if we had the Internet, phone connections, and all of our printed material suddenly vanish, would we be able to continue ministry? Now, before you waste good comment space, I am not against any of the above things, I am all for all of them. What I am doing is raising the question, Do we rely too heavily upon everything else at the expense of the most important? I wonder….

Paul’s prayers for the churches he wrote to bounce about in my head. Phrases like “..asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord,  fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God“. He desired that the believers “grow in the grace and knowledge of Jesus“. And, after listing his remarkable credentials, he told the Philippians “Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith”.

The primitive plea of churches of Christ (and other Restoration Movement church’s) and the ideal today is to restore the sort of Christianity we read about in the New Testament. And yet, we largely rely on how we do what we do on Sunday morning, and how well we do it, as the calling card of who we are to a watching world.

Knowing Christ is different than knowing about Him. Am I…, are we getting to know Him? Are we witness, or are we going on hear-say?

To become a “disciple” requires “discipline”. Getting in the Word until it gets into me, making myself pray as I ought, saying and seeing only what He approves, and caring like He cares about others is not learned easily. But it must be learned if we will follow Jesus. Will we do it? Will Ido it? I wonder…

Royce

 

    Jun 23 2009

    The Silence of Scriptures


    Tonight I received correspondence from a friend, a preacher at a mission church. A part of the statement that always appears on his posts says in part, “We speak where the Bible speaks and we are silent where the Bible is silent”. I just “googled” this phrase and 44,600 hits came up. Of course, this is a part of the “Restoration plea…..”.

    Am I nuts? Wouldn’t almost all of the splits and quarrels among Restoration people not have happend if we practiced this principal? Lets be honest, I must agree with the preacher who quipped “.. and where the Bible is silent we have even more to say!“. How true!

    It is most often those things the Bible does not address that become often as important or more important than the gospel.

    What is it that drives people to place personal preferences and tradition on the same level of authority as what the Bible clearly teaches? I think it might be that they don’t really know what the Bible does say. Knowing  two dozen or so passages that are used over and over and over to prove up a few particular distinctives is a poor substitute for having  some understanding of the scheme of redemption revealed in the Bible.

    NO! I don’t claim to know the whole Bible or even most of it. I do know that much of what some coC folks will fiight to the death over can’t be proved up by the Bible. What is needed in our churches is Bible preachers, not church preachers.

    Royce

    Jun 2 2009

    Reading the Bible with understanding..


    “1And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. 2For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. 3And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, 4and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, 5that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.

    Wisdom from the Spirit

     6Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away. 7But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. 8None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. 9But, as it is written,

        “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard,
       nor the heart of man imagined,
    what God has prepared for those who love him”—

     10these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. 11For who knows a person’s thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. 12Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God. 13And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual.

     14The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. 15The spiritual person judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one. 16 “For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ.” (1 Corinthians 2:1-14)

    For the past several weeks I have followed the conversation at http://graceconversation.com between Todd Deaver and Jay Guinn (on the progressive side) and Phil Sanders, Greg Tidwell, and now Greg’s replacement, Mac Deaver (on the conservative side). As I read the posts and the dozens of comments one thing is clear. There is little communication going on.

    For two or more parties to communicate they must be speaking the same language in terms that both understand or else nothing is understood by one or more parties. I sincerely believe that in the passage quoted above from 1st Corinthians there is an answer for the disconnect I have observed, especially the 14th verse.

    It appears that some of the conservatives I have spoken to and have read, simply do not grasp the most elementary spiritual truths of the Scriptures. They define everything in black and white and what they teach requires no spiritual discernment at all to understand. It goes something like this.

    A man called Jesus died for our sins and if you respond in a scripted way to that head knowledge and keep all of the many rules, (some are unwritten in the Bible) you can go to heaven. These rules include the name of the church you must attend, when you must attend, what you must do when you attend, and you must do it right or God will damn you. Also you must not only do the right stuff at the right time but you must also believe the right stuff as well. Never mind that one elder in Tenn. might say something is a “salvation issue” and an elder in Texas, or Alabama might add another or disagree with the first, it is your job to be “right” or you go to hell.

    What a horrific hoax and a shame in the name of Christ! What kind of gospel (good news) is this? Paul had something far different in mind when he penned the words quoted above to the Corinthians. Read that chapter slowly and carefully and I think you might agree with me that only the “spiritual” person will understand the import of the message of grace.

    Some men read the Bible as they would any other book. Those who are born again and have God’s Spirit living in them read it with supernatural understanding. There is a huge, life or death, difference.

    Royce

    May 18 2009

    The Wholeness of Truth


    Today’s post is from the pen and heart of my friend Edward Fudge. The title of this gracEmail is “Wholeness of Truth”. It spoke to my heart and so I decided to share it with you. I am interested in your thoughts on this.
    ____________________________________________________

    (gracEmail list) wholeness of truth
    Edward Fudge
    May 17, 2009

    THE WHOLENESS OF TRUTH

    As a child, I naively thought that the particular subgroup of the non-instrument Churches of Christ into which I was born had discovered “the truth” and that all other Christian groups were either ignorant or dishonest because they differed from us. By the grace of God, when I became a man, I put away those childish ideas.

    I gradually realized that almost all the hymns we sang were written by Christians from other denominations, as were nearly all the biblical commentaries our preachers studied in preparing their lessons. That didn’t mesh with the notion that of all God’s people, we were the most informed.

    As I came to know other Christians personally, I quickly discovered that they were not dishonest at all — their piety and commitment to Christ often dwarfed mine, and what I usually saw within my own religious movement.

    Over the years, there gradually emerged in my mind a picture of the wholeness God desires for his church universal. The fact is that every orthodox Christian group has important truth to share. Each such denomination, fellowship or Christian tradition began by a move of God’s Spirit to recover, renew or restore some element of Christian teaching, activity or experience then dormant, lagging or lacking in the church at large. All of us believers in Jesus need all the truth — and we dare not fail to receive it just because someone else found it first.

    In this quest, we all must learn to eat the meat and throw away the bones. The danger is that we misuse the truth we do discover, or get it out of balance. Every part of the Church — including our own — has abuses and extremes, confusions and errors, which we do well to reject and to avoid.

    The point is not who said something first, but whether it came from the Word of God. If it came from God, it is for all his people. I want all the truth anyone else has found. I also want to share any truth that I might find with others who also love and follow Jesus Christ.

    Edward Fudge

    __________________________________________________

    Thanks for reading,
    Royce